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We’re happy Lukas has joined us at Team Swapit about 2 weeks ago! Lukas is actually studying IT and Communication Technology at the Technical University of Denmark, so he will do a 5 month internship at Swapit.

Without spoiling too much of what’s to come, Lukas is working on some pretty exciting topic that will demonstrate the kind of innovation Swapit is bringing to the world of C2C marketplaces. While traditionally, C2C marketplaces come with a bit of dry sort of classifieds experience, we at Swapit know, we can provide a much more engaging experience for everyone.

We’re all happy that Stephanie has joined us at Swapit HQ last week and is now part of the Swapit team. Here is a quick overview over the Stephanie’s scope of work:

Stephanie loves UI and UX design and has taken charge of everything design-related at Swapit. Stephanie holds a Bachelor of Science from De La Salle University Manila and has previously worked at Hewlett-Packard.

Stephanie has joined the Swapit team in July 2016 to drive our design and user experience to new highs.

We’re already working on some new designs together and they will make their way in the next releases of Swapit on Android and iPhone as well onto our website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ accounts. So stay tuned and keep an eye out for new fresh design coming your way.

It’s almost summer time and that means to give students across town a chance to see what it’s like to be working at Swapit.

This week, we did welcome Jonathan who is currently studying at the University of Hong Kong. He’ll be helping out in the field of marketing, PR and media. Especially with RISE kicking off next week, we can definitely use some help. It is the biggest startup conference in Asia, Swapit has a BETA booth there, was selected for PITCH and BREAKTHROUGH competitions, we’ve got Mentor Hours, investor Office Hours, Night Crawls, workshops, seminars, and so on. It will definitely be a busy week.

Maybe two months ago, I was pitching at Cyberport for the e27 Echelon Summit 2016. While in the end, we were invited to exhibit at Echelon in Singapore, we decided to focus entirely on RISE for now. Yet, on that day at Cyberport, Jonathan came up to me and we talked for a bit. It was great to see him being excited about Swapit. Now, a short while later, he’s here with us preparing for RISE and all the other events that are coming up.

I am sure it will be a great few months and he’ll have learned some of our tricks and secret sauce to keep our traction numbers up and continue to grow rapidly.

You’ve probably already met the Swapit Team before. We are a small bunch of enthusiastic mobile app guys who want to revolutionize the way people deal with pre-loved items.

Pretty much a month ago, we have brought on Vito to our Swapit Team. He has 1.5 years experience in building mobile apps in different fields like remote controlling smart home appliances or connecting to different kinds of hardware devices from a mobile app (iOS/Android) using Bluetooth.

The recruiting process was pretty straight forward for us. We did actually have 4 candidates who were shortlisted and we chose to go for Vito in the end. We all felt he was the best fit for us in terms of skill set and character fit.

So here it is again: Welcome to our team Vito!

Why did we hire now?

As you might know, we raised some funding in December and again in February. About a year ago when I started to lay out a plan for Swapit in terms of product development and business development, it was clear that we will require funding to grow at the pace we need to. During that time, I came across this term:

“Alignment of Capital to Milestones”

For us to be able to raise funding, we needed a clear path forward – a clear set of milestones we align with the capital we want to raise. One major part of our business is to capture as much market share as possible. In the end Swapit is a trading platform and it will only be as successful as many users we have, and as much as we engage those users. While we feel very passionate about our high engagement rates, we do know that we require a large pool of active users for our marketplace to self-sustain. Read my piece on marketplace liquidity if you want to know more about that. At the same time, we had Swapit only available for Android devices. While we consciously choose to support only Android at the start, we always knew we had to push Swapit out to iPhones and iPads too.

So the funding we raised is aligned to two very important milestones:

Bring Swapit to iPhone and iPad

Increase Market Share to (still secret number) of Users

In order to achieve the first goal, we needed to hire a skilled developer to help us get to that point. We feel very comfortable with our choice thus far and we absolutely certain, we will launch a new Swapit beta on the App Store soon.

Stay tuned for our upcoming Swapit on iOS! Get yourself on the Swapit iOS beta list if you’re interested.

Kevin is currently graduating from Hong Kong University and has approached us at the CoCoon Pitch Final event 2 weeks ago. His immediate thought when seeing swapit was that it is perfect students. Especially for international students like himself, who move in and out of their student halls / apartments nearby campus. Such waves of student migration seem to happen twice a year around the end of the old and start of the new semester. So swapit is an obvious and very useful tool students could take advantage of when moving out their place and wanting to get rid of their stuff. At the same time, students who are just moving in, are the perfect buyers of those pre-loved items the older students want to sell off. While they all don’t know each other yet and at the same time they are mostly in very close locations (think student halls and dormitories), swapit can be the perfect discovery tool for them.

So yes, Kevin convinced me there is a valid target audience in these halls and I absolutely agree to his arguments. As a result, Kevin will reach out to all universities in Hong Kong (there are a lot actually) to offer swapit to their students, helping them to trade their pre-loved items.

Now, we officially added our team to our website. You can find a quick overview right here too:

With a combined 36+ years of experience in mobile, business and media, our team is uniquely positioned to establish swapit in the Hong Kong market. If you want to find out more about each of us, please go to the Team section on our website at http://www.swapit.la/#team

Stay tuned for more news about our swapit beta 2 which will launch very soon.